Keys to Staying Motivated

The ability to stay motivated requires that you take deliberate and conscious control of the quality of your thoughts, beliefs, environments, relationships, free time, and diet.

Are your thoughts positive or pessimistic? Do your beliefs about yourself leave you energized or apathetic? Have you created a home that is uplifting or depressing? Do you hang out with people who boost your spirits or bring you down? Do you spend your free time doing enriching activities like reading, learning, or exercising? Or do you spend it watching depressing news broadcasts, mindless television shows, and eating junk food? Do listen to music that is joyful or sad?

Each of these factors plays a role in staying motivated or lethargic. If your thoughts stay on the mistakes you’ve made and your beliefs are that you don’t have the ability to make things better, you will most certainly lack motivation. On the other hand, if you focus on the outcomes you want and you hold on to the belief that you can make them become a reality you will generate sustainable motivation.

Staying motivated also requires that you carefully choose the environments, media, and people you expose yourself to on a daily basis. For example, if you have a prejudice friend or relative who talks hatefully about anyone who is of a different ethnicity or religion than them, you know in advance that hanging out with that person will only bring you down. If you’re in the habit of watching news broadcasts throughout the day, which are always filled with tragic stories, staying inspired will be difficult. If you do nothing to create an uplifting home environment, you will continually feel a subtle downward pull on your spirits.

What you consume also has a tremendous impact on your mood and ability to stay motivated. If you are consuming lots of sugar, salt, junk food, caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol, you will struggle to stay motivated. By eliminating bad habits and adopting a healthy diet, staying inspired becomes much easier.

Everything we think, believe, see, hear, smell, taste, feel, and eat affects our motivation. By just staying aware of each of these areas and how they affect your motivation, you’ll be drawn toward ways to improve them. Once you’ve optimize each one, you will have developed the knowledge and habits for staying motivated.